The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

Air power can do only so much. As Jon Harper of Stars and Stripes reports, Lt. Gen. William Mayville Jr., director of operations for the Joint Staff, told reporters:

“Our current operations are limited in scope. . . . I think in the immediate areas where we have focused our strikes, we’ve had a very temporary effect and . . . we may have blunted some tactical decisions to move in those directions and move further east to Irbil. What I expect the ISIL to do is to look for other things to do -- to pick up and move elsewhere. So I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained or that we are somehow breaking the momentum of the threat posed by ISIL.”

There appear to be no plans to expand the air operations, as:

Senior administration have said that the strikes will remain confined to areas of Iraq where U.S. personnel are at risk or a preventable humanitarian disaster looms …